Why I Went From Die-hard Bernie Delegate to Suffragette for Hillary

On the fourth and final day of the DNC, a volunteer helped me out of my wheelchair on the floor of Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center and escorted me to the restroom. I’d just had back surgery and should have been in bed but after six months of hosting phone banks, driving voters to the polls, and glue-gunning political flair to just about every headband I owned, there was no way I was going to give up my place among the Pennsylvania delegates.

Besides, I had work to do.

The bathroom break, you see, was just a cover up. Once safely inside the handicapped stall, I whipped out my cell phone, hit record, and slowly pulled a folded Bernie Sanders lawn sign from beneath my blinged out pillbox hat. On one side I had added a bright yellow star proclaiming “Black Lives Matter.” In the middle I’d affixed a rhinestone-encrusted homage to the fight for a $15 minimum wage. It was not exactly the kind Jackie O would have worn, but I just turned to the camera and recited historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s most famous quote: “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”

It would be my final act of political subterfuge, though it was certainly not my first. Earlier that week, I’d coached one of my roommates to steal a Hillary Clinton cardboard cut-out from the front of our hotel. I’d worn a homemade Bernie crown to the state delegation breakfast and posed for selfies with actress Rosario Dawson and former Senator Nina Turner. Using my trusty tacky glue, I even created a “War Hawk” fascinator for a fellow Bernie delegate, complete with feathers and an angry red bird to illustrate our dislike of a woman I secretly called “the evil one” and her support of the military industrial complex.

Which is why I was shocked when I got an email a few weeks after the Democratic National Convention inviting me to join Secretary Clinton’s Youth Leadership Council for the state of Pennsylvania.

“This Leadership Council is made up of millennials across Pennsylvania,” the state’s Youth Outreach Director wrote, “who will empower their communities to stop Donald Trump. I want to personally extend an invite to you, as a recent Youth Delegate for Bernie Sanders, to join Youth for Hillary Leadership Council!”

My jaw hit the floor. “Don’t you know I still have my lawn signs out?” I wanted to ask. “I don’t even have a lawn!” But I agreed to a preliminary conference call because there was another evil one I was worried about— the orange evil one— and to me, he was far, far worse.

As a professor of cultural anthropology, I’d always looked forward to September: a new school year, new students, and new documentaries that (hopefully) wouldn’t put my 75 or so charges to sleep. This year, however, was different. This year I was terrified of the sort of people my students might have become over the summer break.

Racism and ignorance have often run rampant on the small rural campus where I teach. Many of my students have never traveled outside the state, let alone the country, and they regularly blame their black classmates, their immigrant co-workers, and their Muslim neighbors for everything that’s gone wrong in their lives. I regularly hear students on my campus expressing anger because they think people of color “took” their scholarship money as a result of Affirmative Action. Seriously.

And this was before Donald Trump made scapegoating fashionable. This was before millions of Americans fell in love with the idea of a wall paid for by Mexico, before the presidential candidate of a major political party could get away with racist, misogynistic, sexist fear-mongering week after week, all in the name of bucking political correctness.

What would I say to the students who’d taken up this ideology? More importantly, what would I say to those who hadn’t? That I had dug my heels in for Bernie instead of going in for Hillary, and sat by doing nothing until we elected Trump, a man who I found totally unfit to lead?

Yes, the Democratic Party chair had been caught tipping the scales for Clinton. And yes, many Bernie delegates were silenced during the convention. Yes, there were reports of election fraud in New York and voter suppression in [California] (http://observer.com/2016/07/california-calls-fraud-demands-dnc-investigation/) and [Arizona] (https://news.vice.com/article/clinton-and-democratic-party-will-sue-arizona-over-alleged-voter-suppression), and I still think the superdelegate system needs to go.

But six months ago, I’d thrown myself into the Sanders campaign because of my students—even those who refused, despite my best efforts, to get “woke.” They deserved debt-free tuition, a fair shot at the American dream and—oh yeah—a planet that would still be around for their children. And for them I would take up my tacky glue again.

So I packed up my pillbox hat, removed the Bernie crown from Hillary’s cardboard head, and headed back to the craft store with a new project in mind. After a quick scroll through the Smithsonian’s online archives, I settled on three rolls of ribbon: yellow, purple and white—the same colors used by the National American Women’s Suffrage Association nearly a hundred years ago. Their sashes read “Votes for Women.” Mine would proclaim, “Votes for a Woman.”